Fedora Linux

Configuring IMAP and POP3 Email

Having mail delivered to the system mailboxes in /var/spool/mail is fine—as long as the users are using an MUA running on the Fedora system. If a user is running his MUA on another system—Evolution on another Fedora system in the local network, or perhaps Outlook on a Windows machine—then the user needs IMAP or POP3 access to the remote mailbox.

How Do I Do That?

Fedora’s Dovecot server provides IMAP and POP3 access.

When freshly installed, Dovecot will not successfully start. Dovecot requires security certificates to enable encrypted communications. There are three solutions to this problem:

Buy a certificate

A certificate is signed by a certificate authority (CA), who—theoretically—is trusted by both the client and server. The CA certifies that the parties to whom certificates are issued are who they say they are, therefore eliminating the possibility of a malicious party between the client and the server masquerading as the server.

Tip

Buying a certificate is not covered in this lab.

Create your own certificate

Because there is no way to verify the authenticity of the certificate (whether unsigned or self-signed) with a third party, most client programs will present a warning dialog every time a certificate of this type is encountered. However, the connection will still be encrypted.

Disable encryption

In all cases—whether encryption is disabled or not—Dovecot will accept unencrypted connections. If you are in a secure environment (for ...